Download France in 1328

THE
HUNDRED YEARS
WAR
JONATHAN SUMPTION
VOLUME I
Trial by Battle
Contents
Title Page
List of Maps and Plans
Preface
I France in 1328
II The England of Edward III
III Gascony
IV Crises of Succession
V War in Scotland, 1331–1335
VI The Failure of Diplomacy: The Threat at Sea, 1335–1337
VII Grand Strategy, 1337–1338
VIII Cambrai and the Thiérache, 1338–1339
IX The Flemish Alliance and the Campaigns on the Scheldt, 1339–1340
X Sluys and Tournai: The War of the Albrets, 1340
XI Brittany, 1341–1343
XII The Truce of Malestroit, 1343–1345
XIII Bergerac and Auberoche, 1345–1346
XIV Aiguillon and Crécy, 1346
XV The Siege of Calais, 1346–1347
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Maps and Plans
In the text
1 Paris in 1328
2 The French royal succession
3 Gascony: the Constable’s campaign, 1337
4 Gascony: the southern march, 1337–9
5 The French offensive in the Garonne, November 1338–July 1339
6 The Cambrésis and the Thiérache: Edward III’s campaign, September–October 1339
7 English positions at La Capelle, 23 October 1339
8 Fighting in the Low Countries, December 1339–May 1340
9 The Scheldt Valley offensive, May–June 1340
10 Sluys and the Zwin Estuary, 24 June 1340
11 Gascony: the war of the Albrets, March–August 1340
12 A military occupation: French garrisons in the Garonne Valley and southern Périgord, August–
September 1340
13 The battle of Saint-Omer, 26 July 1340
14 The siege of Tournai, July–September 1340
15 Bouvines, September 1340
16 The Breton succession, 1341
17 Gascony: the battle of Guîitres, 26 August 1341
18 The march of Gascony, January 1343–May 1345
19 The Bergerac campaign, August 1345
20 The Earl of Derby’s invasion of Périgord, September–October 1345
21 English occupation of the Bordelais, winter 1345–6
22 Agenais and southern Périgord, November 1345–March 1346
23 Defences of Aiguillon
24 The English army in northern France, July–September 1346
25 Caen
26 Western approaches to Paris
27 Crossings of the Somme
28 Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346
29 Calais
30 The Earl of Lancaster in Poitou and Saintonge, September–October 1346
31 The Scotch invasion, October 1346
32 The march of Flanders, 1347
At the end
I Provinces of France, 1328
II South-western France
III England and Wales and the Channel Islands
Scotland
V The Low Countries, 1337–47
VI Brittany
IV
Preface
This book is intended to be the first volume of a history of the Hundred Years War, from its outbreak
in the 1330s until the final expulsion of the English from France in the middle of the fifteenth century.
This succession of destructive wars, separated by tense intervals of truce and by dishonest and
impermanent treaties of peace, is one of the central events in the history of England and France, as
well as in that of their neighbours who were successively drawn into it: Scotland, Germany, Italy and
Spain. It laid the foundations of France’s national consciousness, even while destroying the prosperity
and political pre-eminence which France had once enjoyed. It formed her institutions, creating, in the
effort to control anarchy and defeat invasion, the germ of the absolute state of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In England, it brought intense effort and suffering, a powerful tide of patriotism,
great fortune succeeded by bankruptcy, disintegration and utter defeat.
I have written about England and France together, almost as if they were a single community
engaged in a civil war as, in some respects, they were. I have tried to describe not only what happened,
but why it happened and how it affected those who experienced it, whether they were close at hand,
like the soldiers in the field and the inhabitants of countless burned-out villages and towns, or saw it at
a distance, like the bankers, war contractors, bureaucrats and tax-payers, and the readers of newsletters
and proclamations. But this book is a narrative. The sweep of events provides its framework. I make
no apology for that. Although narrative history has not always been fashionable, the facts sometimes
explain themselves better than any analysis of them could possibly do. Moreover, while there have
been many valuable monographs on this or that aspect of the Hundred Years War, some fine histories
of isolated incidents and campaigns, and one magnificent account of a single ruler (Charles V of
France), no general history of the war has been written on the scale which it deserves. The best
account remains that of the great French historian and anglophile, Edouard Perroy, written without
access to books while the author was working with the French resistance in the later years of the
Second World War. But in a single volume covering 120 years not even Perroy, with his profound
knowledge of both English and French sources, could convey more than the outline of events, or
penetrate behind the screen to observe the lives of men who never pretended to call the order of events
but were only spectators and victims.
My approach has been to work primarily from the record sources of England and France, printed
and unprinted. Later volumes will draw on the archives of Italy and Spain also. The chroniclers have
an important but subordinate place. They have much to say about the character of the war and their
anecdotes are often very revealing. They provide insights into the aristocratic mentality which the
records can rarely offer. Depending upon the quality of their sources, they can be reliable guides to the
course of events. But most of them are episodic, prejudiced, inaccurate and late. Froissart is
particularly unreliable. Moreover, being essentially journalists, the chroniclers were also snobs. They
rarely showed much interest in events in which no duke, earl or count participated. So, except for the
tremendous battle at Sluys in 1340, they said almost nothing about the war at sea, which was waged by
lowly men. Gascony was virtually ignored until 1345, when the first earl fought there. But the records
throw a flood of light on these events, unselfconscious evidence, written by clerks who had no idea of
recording history. I have identified in the notes the authorities for what I say in the text. But with rare
exceptions I have not discussed conflicts of evidence or debated the divergent opinions of scholars. I
have simply resolved the differences to my own satisfaction, and I hope to yours.
J.P.C.S.
Greenwich
May 1989
l.t. and l.p. stand respectively for livres tournois or pounds of Tours, and livres parisis or pounds of
Paris. The pound sterling was generally worth five l.t. and four l.p. Unless otherwise stated livres are
livres tournois.
CHAPTER I
France in 1328
Charles IV, the last Capetian King of France, died on 1 February 1328 at the royal manor of
Vincennes, east of Paris. The burial of a king in the early fourteenth century was already an elaborate
ceremony, marking off with a studied symbolism the end of a reign and the beginning of another. The
body of the dead King, imperfectly preserved with vinegar and salt and aromatic spices, lay in state in
Notre-Dame Cathedral, clothed in heavy robes of gold cloth and ermine, the crown at its head, the face
exposed and the hands holding the regalia of office, the sceptre, ring and staff of justice as if in a
macabre reversal of the coronation ceremony. On the following Friday, 5 February, the body was
carried on an open bier to the mausoleum of the French monarchy at Saint-Denis, accompanied by a
procession in which precedence assigned his exact place to every man. The Bishop of Paris, his fellow
bishops, the chapter of Notre-Dame and the clergy of the city preceded it; the royal family and the
principal noblemen followed behind; at the rear came the leaders of the rich citizenry of Paris dressed
in black with large hoods covering their faces; and close around the bier the poor of the city for whom
the funeral of a king was an occasion for the distribution of largesse, a formality which no royal will
omitted.
The route from Notre-Dame to Saint-Denis passed through the streets of Paris for scarcely 2 miles
before emerging into open country to the north. Yet the Paris of 1328, although it covered but a
fraction of the area of the modern city, was the largest, most densely populated city of northern
Europe and the richest. Within its walls and in the new suburbs to the north, more than 100,000 people
lived, at a time when London probably had less than 40,000 inhabitants. Its citizens were packed into a
dense mass of tall, narrow wood-frame houses, separated by a warren of irregular alleyways which
Jean de Jandun from the calm of the university quarter on the south bank likened to the ‘hairs of a
multitude of heads, ears of corn piled up after a plentiful harvest, or leaves in a dense forest’.1 They
lived every day with the indescribable din of raucous cries, rumbling carts, driven cattle, clanging
bells and shouts of ‘gare à l’eau’ as slops fell into the street from upper windows. Only the proximity
of the open country outside can have saved from perpetual epidemic a city which had no sewer until
1374 and only three public fountains, all of them north of the Seine, a place where the more fastidious
emptied the contents of their latrines weekly into carts to be dumped outside the walls, where pigs,
dogs and rats rooted among the piles of garbage, butchers slaughtered their animals in the streets and
lepers wandered at large.
No city renewed itself naturally in the unhealthy conditions of the middle ages, and Paris had long
drawn its expanding population from immigrants attracted by the wealth, fame and freedom of the
capital. An increasingly bureaucratic monarchy had established its courts and record offices there. The
great noblemen of the realm, the counts of Burgundy, Brittany, Flanders and Champagne, the princes
of the royal family and the more important bishops and abbots visited the city on official business
accompanied by crowds of servants and hangers-on, accommodating them in substantial mansions
within the walls. Rapid fortunes were made by commodity speculators, bankers and food wholesalers,
giving rise to stark contrasts of wealth and poverty, and supplying a market for the luxury trades for
which Paris was famous throughout Europe: painters, jewellers, goldsmiths, furriers. A large
community of Florentine and Sienese bankers had grown up in the mercantile quarter on the right
bank of the Seine. On the left bank, the University attracted an unruly clerical underworld, several
thousand strong. And beneath all these came the tide of salaried journeymen, domestic servants and
mendicant poor, the ballast of every medieval city. Survival was not easy, and comfort rare.
Notre-Dame in 1328 looked very much as it does today. But it would have been seen not squarely at
the end of a wilderness of concrete but in glimpses through the streets around it. Emerging from the
darkness of the cathedral, the funeral procession would have come out into a narrow porticoed square
populated by beggars, hawkers and ecclesiastical booksellers. A few feet away from the sculpted
portals of the cathedral the funeral procession would already have buried itself in the streets and lanes
of the Ile de la Cité, passing into the rue Neuve Notre-Dame, a broad straight street which the chapter
of the cathedral had opened up in 1163 to accommodate the heavy wagons of materials for its
buildings. But this was as far as town planning went in medieval Paris. The rue Neuve Notre-Dame
came to an abrupt end at the Marché Palu, one of the main thoroughfares of the Ile de la Cité leading
south towards the Petit Pont and the south bank. To the left, towards the bridge, lay the squalid quarter
to which the beggars, wastrels and prostitutes had been banished by royal order ever since they had
become a menace to respectable Parisians in the 1250s. On the right lay the southern entrance to the
Juiverie, the short street where those other outcasts the Jews had had their stalls and their synagogues
until their expulsion from France only two decades earlier. Passing along the rue de la Calandre (now
obliterated by the police barracks and Préfecture) the funeral procession reached the east wall of the
royal palace. Occupying the whole of the western end of the island on the present site of the Palais de
Justice and the Conciergerie, the huge, rambling, ill-planned palace to which each monarch had made
his own additions had come to resemble a small city of itself, gathered beneath the spire of its own
cathedral, the Sainte-Chapelle. Marking off the palace from the city lay the wing which the dead King
had himself added to house the officials of the royal treasury. Charles IV’s modest building enterprise
was at least uncontroversial. As his bier approached the Seine by the Barillerie (now the Boulevard du
Palais) it was carried past the King’s Great Hall, that ‘marvellous and costly work’, now misnamed
the Conciergerie and known principally for having housed the victims of the Revolution. Enguerran de
Marigny, the unscrupulous Finance Minister of Philip the Fair, had put it up some twenty years before,
a fact which was still remembered with bitterness by citizens whose houses and water mills along the
river’s edge had been expropriated.
The procession crossed the Grand Pont, a broad wooden bridge lined on either side with shuttered
booths, the premises of the silversmiths and money-changers who traded there until the eighteenth
century and gave the bridge its modern name, the Pont-au-Change. On other days the bridge was the
hub of the city’s life, perpetually blocked, because it carried the main road through the capital, by
crowds of shoppers and loiterers, carriages and herds of cattle. At the northern end of the bridge the
procession crossed over the strand. The Seine was not embanked in 1328. Instead, the ground
gradually rose out of the river and merged with the city streets forming a mire of intermingled land
and water, in summer the site of a long ribbon of shopkeepers’ stalls, in winter an invitation to floods.
Looking back from the right bank of the river one could see the stumps of the old Grand Pont, the fine
stone structure carried away by the floods of 1296. The Parisians had constructed water-mills on the
piers, connected by ramshackle wooden gangways. By the central pier a mass of barges waited in the
queue to pay the toll exacted by the municipality or to discharge goods on the strand, the proprietors
offering samples to onlookers standing above them.
1 Paris in 1328
Once it was clear of the bridge, the funeral procession filed past a curious communal warehouse
built out on piles over the river, and then squeezed into a narrow street under the wall of the Châtelet.
The Châtelet was a venerable building, a small fortress dating back to the early twelfth century (and
not demolished until 1810) which had once guarded the entrance to Paris. Now, deprived of its
function by the outward spread of the city, it had become a state prison and a block of offices, the seat
of the provost (or governor) of the capital. Hemmed in against it on the eastern side, the procession
passed on the right the Parloir aux Bourgeois, a cramped and irregular group of buildings which
accommodated the municipality of Paris until it moved to its present site in the Place de Grève in
1357. Adjoining it on the north side, the church of St Leufroy, once the first suburban church of Paris,
was now embedded in the busiest part of the city and had been turned over, like its neighbours, to
official use. It housed the block of stone which served as the standard measure of the mercantile
community, the rough precursor of the universal kilogram of platinum. Leaving the Châtelet behind
them, the mourners passed on their right the obscure entrances to the foul-smelling quarter where the
butchers of Paris had their premises around the parish church of St Jacques-la-Boucherie. Here were
the heavy, violent men, organized into the oldest and most privileged of the city’s guilds, who were to
supply the mob leaders in a century of Paris revolutions to come.
The procession entered the Grand’ Rue (known from the end of the fourteenth century as the rue
Saint-Denis) at a point marked today by the north-west corner of the Place du Châtelet, where many of
the armourers of Paris carried on their trade. Overshadowed since 1858 by the roaring Boulevard de
Sebastopol, this famous street was once the main thoroughfare of the capital, crowded with hawkers
and gapers, with carts bringing goods to Les Halles on Fridays, and occasionally with the tumbrils
passing in the opposite direction and the great mobs which escorted criminals to the gallows in the
plain north of Paris. This was the royal road from the palace of the Ile de la Cité to the abbey of Saint-
Denis, scene of the triumphal entries and funeral processions of generations of French kings, the street
by which the army of Philip VI was to march to its destruction at the battle of Crécy. The Grand’ Rue
revealed much of the character of Paris. The city’s wealth was flaunted in its paving, a rare luxury in
medieval cities. Its solid bourgeois mansions housed some of its richest citizens. A parade of churches
and religious foundations created an ecclesiastical atmosphere which today is entirely lost:
‘wonderfully provided with monasteries and churches, handsomely constructed and crowned with tall
steeples’, as an Irish traveller had described it five years earlier. 2 The Grand’ Rue was the axis along
which Paris had moved northward in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, spreading out in new and
smart suburbs on the great monastic estates situated on either side of the road. The character of the
city had changed in the process. Medieval cities never entirely lost their rural atmosphere. The
principal charity hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, had once kept pigs next to the refectory within ten yards of
Notre-Dame. There had been famous vineyards on the left bank, opposite the Cité. Townsmen had
sown their grain in the suburbs and raised fruit trees under the city walls. However, the distinction
between town and country hardened as the spreading wash of buildings put all this further out of
reach, except for those religious houses whose jealously enclosed orchards, walled vineyards and
vegetable gardens were by now the only reminders of a rural past.
Passing through the salt merchants’ district at the south end of the modern rue Saint-Denis the
mourners reached the cloistered foundation of St Catherine at the point where the road is now crossed
by the rue des Lombards. Its monks and nuns were charged with the burial of travellers found dead on
the roads. Directly opposite stood the apse of the church of St Opportune, a house of secular canons
which maintained an important hospice for pilgrims. Between the doorway of St Catherine’s and the
cemetery of the Innocents a little further on, the mourners filed through streets on normal days
impassable for the hawkers and itinerant merchants of bric-à-brac who had made this quarter their
pitch.
The Innocents, a great walled enclosure halfway between the Grand Pont and the northern gate, was
for centuries the principal cemetery of Paris, its largest open space and on weekdays its busiest food
market, a place famous for its crowds and noise on occasions less solemn than this one. Beside the
small chapel which served it, the Fontaine des Innocents provided the public water supply for much of
northern Paris, the ancestor of what is now the grandest fountain of the city. West of this quarter,
glimpsed by the mourners as they walked along the Grand’ Rue, a warren of narrow streets led back to
Les Halles, where Philip Augustus 150 years before had established the main market of Paris for eight
centuries. Just north of the cemetery along the processional route the church of the Holy Sepulchre,
still incomplete, stood shrouded in builders’ scaffolding. Edward II of England had contributed to its
funds, and his estranged wife and son, the future conqueror of much of France, had attended the laying
of the foundation stone only two years earlier. The tide of church-building was not yet over. But the
end of two centuries of expansion was not far away, and the pilgrims’ hospice which it was destined to
serve was never built.
Behind the houses which extended northward along the street from St Sepulchre, there stood the
undistinguished but magnificently endowed abbey church of St Magloire, surrounded by a spacious
enclosure, the landlord to most of the district. Only recently the church-going population of the
surrounding streets had been able to make do with a side altar in the abbey dedicated to St Gilles and
St Leu. Now their pressing numbers required a parish church, and the church of St Gilles and St Leu,
forty yards north of the old abbey, had been put up within the last ten years. St Leu has been much
altered since its apse was found, in the 1850s, to be out of alignment with the Boulevard de
Sebastopol, but it remains the only building in the rue Saint-Denis which the mourners of Charles IV
would recognize today.
The last hundred yards of the processional route towards the gate of Paris brought the King’s body
into a district only recently built over, which had become the artists’ quarter of the city, a district not
of bohemian scroungers but of small workshop proprietors more notable for output than originality.
The house of the fraternity of St James, another pilgrims’ foundation, stood on the left as the cortège
approached the formal limits of the city. It had been completed only the year before, dedicated to the
service of God by Jean de Marigny, Bishop of Beauvais, a man who was to spend the declining years
of his life fighting against the English in south-western France. Behind the buildings of the hospice
could be seen the roofs of the Hôtel d’Artois (soon to become the Hôtel de Bourgogne), a cluster of
buildings all dating from the past half-century which was the home of the formidable old Countess of
Artois. It was one of the grandest aristocratic mansions in Paris, its rooms lit by great glass windows
and supplied with piped water laid on from the Fountain of the Innocents a few hundred yards away,
two of the greatest luxuries available to rich men of the fourteenth century.
The procession reached the formal limits of the city at the ramparts of Philip Augustus. When
Philip built them at the end of the twelfth century only two groups of buildings of any importance lay
outside. The fortified suburb of the Knights Templar lay in the middle of an insalubrious marsh about
half a mile north-east of the new walls, just south of the modern Place de la République. Almost
directly north of the city, at about the same distance, lay the less formidably defended enclosure of the
wealthy Cluniac priory of St Martin-des-Champs. Neither place retained its dignified isolation now.
Although the monks still looked out to the north of their buildings on fields and vineyards, to the
south a continuous line of houses stretched out along the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin, and
other buildings were moving into the side roads to fill the tract of land between their own walls and
those of the capital. When the mourners emerged from the Porte Saint-Denis, at the point where the
rue Saint-Denis now crosses the rue de Turbigo, they would have found little to distinguish the
crowded suburbs from the city which they had just left. The ramparts had long ago lost their military
significance and in a century of peace Parisians had grown accustomed to the fact. Philip Augustus
had let out towers and gates to private tenants from the moment it was built. The outer wall of the
Porte Saint-Denis, an austere fortified gateway flanked by two fortified towers, was now
incongruously decorated with an elegant pointed window at its first-floor level, and a statue of the
Virgin Mary. The true boundary of Paris lay well north of it, marked by a stagnant stream known as La
Pissotte de St Martin, where the city’s sewage was dumped.
At about the point where the rue Saint-Denis now crosses the rue Réaumur near the RéaumurSebastopol Métro station, the procession came into open country, crossing a broad belt of land around
the north of the city whose marshy ground and fetid streams were a sufficient deterrent to potential
settlers. But it was fit enough for the undesirables who lived there. Half a mile away to the east stood
the monumental tricornered gibbet of Montfaucon. Closer at hand, a little way past the Pissotte on the
left, the Filles-Dieu housed 200 redeemed prostitutes, the quality of whose lives was a familiar
Parisian joke. A few hundred yards further north around the chapel of St Lazare lay the huts and
refectory of the principal Parisian leper colony side by side with the lodge in which the kings of
France customarily spent the night before making their triumphal entries into Paris. The juxtaposition
of squalor and splendour was typical of the age and place. Both of these foundations had been the
work of rich citizens of Paris applying their wealth in a fashion set by the older nobility. It was an
assertion of status as conspicuous as those other pretensions of the patrician families of Paris, the
country estate, the patent of nobility and, two years after Charles’s death, the tournament held in the
plain over to the right beyond the abbey of St Martin-des-Champs, where the gorgeously dressed sons
of Paris merchants re-enacted in mock battle the wars of Troy and the deeds of the knights of the
Round Table.3
The marsh gave way to firmer ground, and for more than 4 miles the procession trailed across the
rich, empty plain of Saint-Denis. On the left a low line of hills followed the Seine as it wound round to
the north of Paris, prominent among them the hill of Montmartre, then crowned by a tiny country
village and a nunnery of which the name of the Place des Abbesses is now the only relic. Extending
down to the edges of the low-lying villages, rows of vines marked out a district which was famous for
its wine until Paris engulfed it in the nineteenth century. The royal household drew its supplies not
from Bordeaux but from Clignancourt, St Ouen and Argenteuil:
le plus digne
Par sa bonté, par sa puissance
D’abrever bien le roi de France
as a thirteenth-century poet sang.4
By the end of the morning, the funeral procession would have reached La Chapelle, a small winegrowing village whose identity is still preserved by the survival of its parish church (in the rue de la
Chapelle) where a hundred years later Joan of Arc would pray before unsuccessfully attempting the
capture of Paris from the English. At its northern edge lay the boundary of the domain of the abbey of
Saint-Denis, a point marked on the road by a leaning cross. Here the procession was met by the abbot
and monks, a moment which emphasized the dignity which their abbey derived from its long
connection with the French monarchy. The Bishop of Paris had no jurisdiction beyond this point, and
was required to admit as much in a sealed document before removing his robes of office. He and all
his clergy and fellow bishops with him entered the land of Saint-Denis in plain religious garb. The
pall-bearers were replaced and the procession formed up behind the community of Saint-Denis for the
last 3 miles of the journey through the mild countryside today desolate with industrial ugliness. As the
line of mourners passed into the town of Saint-Denis and approached the abbey enclosure, most of the
laymen and lesser clergy fell away, leaving the monks, a few ecclesiastical grandees and more
important royal princes and household officers to their privilege of burying the royal dead.
*
France in 1328 occupied a position of apparent strength but real weakness. Charles IV had ruled a
territory somewhat smaller than that of modern France. To the north it included the whole of the
county of Flanders and the western part of what is now Belgium. But in the east the kingdom extended
no further than the Meuse, the Saône and the Rhône. Hainault, Lorraine, part of Burgundy, the
Dauphiné, Savoy and the whole of Provence lay outside it, although much of this territory was Frenchspeaking and their rulers moved in the political orbit of France. Lyon had been French for barely
twenty years when Charles IV died, and east of Lyon lay territory which was still ostensibly part of the
German Empire. A lawyer–Pope writing to the King of France in 1265 might well wonder whether
Viviers, a cathedral city on the west bank of the Rhône, was in France or the German Empire. ‘We
find the boundaries between your kingdom and the Empire nowhere recorded in writing, and we have
no idea where they run.’5 France was not Gaul.
Nevertheless she was beyond question the richest and most populous European country. In 1328 a
census of taxable households compiled by officials of the royal treasury enumerated 2,469,987
households divided between nearly 24,000 parishes. The great fiefs and princely appanages (which the
King did not tax) were excluded, and techniques of enumeration were no doubt less refined than those
misleadingly precise figures would suggest. Even so, France in 1328 can scarcely have had less than
16 million inhabitants, which was about three times the population of contemporary England.
This population, impressively dense for the period, was supported by agricultural resources which
had unceasingly expanded for 300 years. In the second half of the thirteenth century the countryside
had been at the height of its prosperity. The cultivated area had reached its greatest extent, the result
of a prolonged assault on the heathland, forest and marsh which had once covered much of the
kingdom. In Froissart’s evocative words: ‘At that time, France was gorged, contented and strong, its
people rich and prospering, and not one of them knew the word war.’6
In retrospect, it is possible to see that this society had already passed its apogee. The pattern
differed from province to province. The peak of the boom may have been reached as early as the
1260s, although it was not for many years after that that the symptoms of economic change became
apparent to contemporaries. In much of France the countryside had become not only populous but
crowded. The assault on the forest could go no further without encroaching on woodlands needed for
grazing animals, hunting and growing timber. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the expansion
of the cultivated area came to a halt. But the population continued to grow. Real wages faltered and
then declined. The rise of prices accelerated. Average expectation of life, never very high in the poorly
nourished rural communities of the middle ages, fell back to about twenty years. To begin with these
strains affected chiefly the towns and the poor. Proprietors and tenant farmers prospered mightily.
Food prices reached a peak during the famines of 1315–17 never attained before. Or afterwards. It was
the turning point of their fortunes. Agricultural prices began to fall sharply in the 1320s and did not
recover even when the hunger returned. Rents fell with them. Thus began the long agricultural
depression of the fourteenth century. Aristocratic incomes fell, and in some provinces fell
catastrophically. Beyond the crosses which marked the boundaries of each community, in untidy
shanty villages of hastily erected cabins, there grew up the communities of rootless poor who took a
subsistence by begging and hiring themselves out to work the fields at harvest time. In 1320 and 1321
the discontent of these outcasts, and others thrown among them by circumstance, had erupted in a rash
of localized rebellions accompanied in some places by virulent attacks on the Church and massacres
of Jews. Between 1323 and 1328 a civil war of unparalleled savagery was fought between the
landowners and peasants of western Flanders. These events were harbingers of graver problems to
come.
Some men simply fled from their problems. Smallholdings shrank or vanished, their former owners
drifting to the towns. However, the capacity of the towns to take them depended on a delicate
economic balance which had already shown signs of failing. The population of the towns had grown in
the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries even faster than the population of the rest of France.
The greater towns had thrown their limits outwards in successive campaigns of wall-building. Others,
which marked their limits less grandly with ditches and joined-up façades at the edges, added new
streets like concentric rings around the hearts of ancient trees, or spread themselves in rambling
suburbs which merged gradually with the fields around. In the south the greater princes and
ecclesiastical corporations laid out several hundred new towns (bastides) where settlements had never
been. In the old towns men crammed themselves into the squalid quarters where immigrants were
traditionally found, making them more insanitary than they had ever been and aggravating still further
the difficulties of supplying them. It is easy to under-estimate how great these difficulties were in an
age in which carrying bulky supplies overland called for supreme effort if it were possible at all. A
typical provincial town of some 3,000 inhabitants consumed more than 1,000 tons of grain a year,
requiring a cultivated district of about 8,000 acres in which to grow it. Larger towns could not hope to
feed themselves from their own districts, and depended upon provisions brought from a considerable
distance. Flanders, the most heavily urbanized region of France, was dependent for its food supply on
road and river lines extending far beyond the boundaries of the province into northern France,
Hainault, Brabant and the Rhineland. Paris was provisioned by a corporation of privileged
wholesalers, the Hanse des Marchands de l’Eau, who enjoyed powers by royal grant to control the
commercial traffic of the whole valley of the Seine from Nogent to the sea, together with much of the
valley of the Oise.7 It was a miracle of commercial organization, but it was not enough. The first
warning came with the famine of 1305 when the bakers of Paris had to board up their shops against
mobs. Then came the famines of 1315–17 and the epidemics of the 1320s and 1330s. Some northern
cities lost a tenth of their population to the plague. In Flanders, the death rate was higher. The denser
the population, the greater the distress. Périgueux, which was among the most densely populated cities
of southern France, lost a third of its inhabitants during the famines of the 1330s. War was another
scourge to complete the misery of such places. They were much more vulnerable to it than they would
have been a century before. Their swollen suburbs were liable to be demolished by friends or burned
by enemies. A road or river cut might mean hunger for weeks; a harvest burned, starvation for the best
part of a year.8
The industrial wealth of France was heavily concentrated in one industry, textiles, and in one
region, the north-west: Flanders, Artois and Picardy and a small number of towns in the neighbouring
provinces of Normandy and Champagne. In Flanders the textile industry had caused great towns to
grow up from little more than villages in an explosion of commercial activity which had few parallels
in European history before the nineteenth century. Ghent, with about 60,000 inhabitants, was the
largest city of northern Europe after Paris. Arras, Douai, Bruges, Ypres and Lille, although smaller,
were very substantial by the standards of any other region. In this confined corner of the kingdom was
packed the teeming proletariat which manufactured broadcloth, the staple of international trade, and
throughout the middle ages the only industrial product made in quantity for export. Production on this
scale required regimentation and considerable capital. Both were provided by a small class of
merchants, who also constituted in almost every case the governing oligarchy of the city. They
brought the raw wool in England, and sold it to self-employed artisans to be woven, cleaned and dyed
in many small workshops. Quite frequently the merchant also supplied the equipment and rented out
the premises. At the end of the process, he bought back the finished product and sold it on to
middlemen, principally Italians, for distribution as far afield as Spain, Russia and the Near East. Great
fortunes were made.
Contrasts of wealth and poverty were not easily concealed in the close environment of medieval
towns. In crowded houses within the walls and in sprawling shanty towns of thatched huts outside, the
artisans lived in conditions no more squalid perhaps than those of the average northern peasant but
bitterly resented for being experienced side by side with the close-fistedness and ostentatious wealth
of the financiers on whom they depended. In 1280 there were risings in Ypres, Bruges and Douai. In
1301 a far graver rebellion broke out in Bruges and Ghent under the leadership of a ‘genial and
smooth-talking’ weaver, Peter Koninck, and succeeded for a time in supplanting the government of
the commercial oligarchy. These events proved to be the first of a series of urban revolutions in
Flanders which gravely damaged France’s only important industry. Some of the trade which Flanders
lost moved south to older, more peaceful cities such as Amiens and Rouen. But much of it moved
beyond the frontiers of the kingdom to the imperial territories of Hainault and Brabant.
These events had greater consequences for France than the ruin of some Flemish capitalists and the
displacement of the oligarchies of the northern cities. The looms of Flanders had drawn across eastern
France one of the major trade routes of Europe. Thirty years before Charles IV died, the international
fairs of Champagne held successively at Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes had been the hub of
European banking where the cloth merchants met the Italian dealers who financed the trade. But by
1328 the fairs had lost their banking business, and their importance as an exchange of goods was
waning rapidly. It was in part the natural consequence of geographical changes which could not have
been avoided: new patterns of trade over the Alpine passes drew the main routes further east, and the
opening up by the Italians of the sea route to northern Europe by the straits of Gibraltar by-passed
France altogether. But the process was accelerated by the troubles of Flanders and the policies of the
French Crown. The kings repeatedly prosecuted their disputes with the counts of Flanders by
impounding the goods of their subjects. The Flemings had lost their goods throughout France in 1297.
They had been banned from the fairs by Philip the Fair between 1302 and 1305 and again by his son in
1315. They stayed away. The Italian traders, whose own nascent cloth industries in Florence and
Milan were beginning to compete with those of Flanders, increasingly found their opportunities
elsewhere. Philip the Fair hastened their departure by subjecting them to persecution, forced loans and
discriminatory taxation.9
Toll-gates are eloquent witnesses of economic decline. South of Arras, at the cross-roads of
Bapaume which long ago had marked the frontier of Flanders, a great toll-gate stood across the main
roads from Paris to the industrial cities of Flanders and east from the cities of Champagne to the
Atlantic ports. The tolls fell by two-thirds in the immediate aftermath of the troubles of Flanders in
1302 and again, although by less, in the crisis of 1313–15. The toll collectors at the approaches to the
Alpine passes told the same story of erratic but persistent descent from the golden years of the late
thirteenth century.10
*
In spite of the visible strain which the troubles of the early fourteenth century inflicted on French
society, few contemporaries could have foreseen the political catastrophes of the next two reigns.
They stood as much in awe of France in 1328 as they had ever done. They still saw the rich glow of the
golden thirteenth century, the century of St Louis, of the Roman d e l a Rose and of the great Gothic
cathedrals and abbeys, founded in a mood of earnest opulence which the chronicler Joinville had
likened to the illumination of a manuscript in azure and gold. The University of Paris was truly, as an
Irish visitor described it in 1323, ‘the home and nurse of theological and philosophical science, the
mother of the liberal arts, the mistress of justice and the standard of morals, the mirror and lamp of all
theological virtues’. The architecture of the Ile de France had conquered the native traditions of every
western European country and for a while had taken complete possession. Italian noblemen studied
French sartorial fashions and learned to speak French, which they described as the most beautiful
language in existence. Dante’s commentator, Benvenuto of Imola, who tells us this, was one of the
many contemporaries who resented the intrusion of French manners, just as the poet himself had
resented the money and brute force by which France had established herself in Italy during the
thirteenth century.11
The German prince who railed against ‘prating Frenchmen always sneering at other nations than
their own’12 had been worsted in diplomacy, but in using the occasion for an outburst against Gallic
swaggering he was voicing the feelings of many of his contemporaries as well as paying an implied
tribute to the power which had made the swaggering possible. In the course of the thirteenth century
French armies had fought in England and the Low Countries, in Spain, in Italy and in the Middle East.
French dynasties ruled in Provence, Naples, Navarre, Cyprus and Greece, and within recent memory
they had ruled in Sicily and Constantinople. The papacy was installed in Avignon at the outer gate of
France, governed by a succession of French popes and a college of cardinals in which Frenchmen held
an overwhelming majority. ‘The government of the earth’, Jean de Jandun announced in his eulogy of
Paris, ‘belongs rightfully to the august and sovereign House of France.’13
By the standards of fourteenth-century European states, France’s military strength was prodigious.
The army available to its rulers for field service was conventionally estimated at between 20,000 and
25,000 men, one-quarter of them cavalry. The armies planned for the invasion of Flanders in 1304, the
proposed crusade of 1323 and mooted campaigns in Gascony in 1326, 1329 and 1330 were all of this
size. But from time to time much larger forces could be raised. An army of 50,000 was planned for
1339 (the third year of the war with Edward III) and about that number, divided between two fronts,
actually served in the following year in addition to 20,000 men mobilized for the fleet. By comparison
the English, although they were able on one occasion in the fourteenth century to collect together
32,000 men, only rarely succeeded in fielding as many as 10,000. The sheer numerical strength of
French armies was particularly marked in cavalry, the prestige arm of every medieval army. At the
peak of their military achievement (in September 1340) the French deployed more than 27,000
cavalrymen. Again a comparison with England is revealing. The largest number of cavalrymen that
England deployed at any one time was about 5,000. Numbers of course, are not everything, and by the
beginning of the fourteenth century the great age of medieval cavalry was past. What the numbers do,
however, reveal is the extent of France’s resources, the strength of her military tradition and the
quality of her institutions. The assembling and direction of an army was the greatest collective
enterprise which a medieval society ever undertook.14
The French state as it existed in 1328 was the creation of the fourteen Capetian kings who had
successively ruled France since 987. Alone among the great dynasties of medieval Europe they had
been able to survive for three centuries, each monarch leaving a male heir to carry on his work.
Fortune had favoured them. Most of these rulers had been men of conspicuous ability. None had been
manifestly incompetent. Anointed with holy oil at their coronations, gifted by the propagandists of the
monarchy with powers of miraculous healing, proclaimed in official documents as the superior of
every other mortal, the kings of France had already adopted the trappings of absolutism. ‘Being placed
by the grace of God above all other men, we are bound to the will of Him who has made us thus preeminent’.15 Yet the reality of power was more elusive than the formulae. At the beginning of the
eleventh century Robert II, in whose name these words were uttered, exercised direct power in less
than a tenth of his kingdom, a compact lozenge of land stretching from Paris in the north to Orléans in
the south. Here he was the immediate feudal lord. Elsewhere he was merely king, compelled to rule
through vassals who exercised the royal power for him but did so in their own names and with an
independence which reduced the monarchy to a portentous honorary dignity. The princes could and
quite frequently did make war upon him and upon each other, as well as maintaining direct relations
with the papacy and foreign powers.
Three centuries passed between the death of Robert II in 1031 and that of Charles IV in 1328,
during which the monarchy had ceaselessly increased both the territorial extent of the royal domain
and the power which they could bring to bear within it. Piecemeal acquisitions continued throughout
the period, but by far the most significant were the three huge accessions of territory which in the
course of the thirteenth century extended the domain of the Capetian kings for the first time to the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The first was the work of Philip Augustus and his son Louis VIII, who
between 1202 and 1224 destroyed the continental empire of the Angevin kings of England, annexing
Normandy, the Loire provinces, Poitou and Saintonge. South of the Dordogne, the Albigensian
crusades had ruined the princes of the house of Toulouse, once ‘the peers of kings’ as the Englishman
Gervase of Tilbury had called them at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1271 a combination
of juridical technicality, good fortune and armed force finally brought this great inheritance into the
hands of the Crown. Three years later the male line of the counts of Champagne and Brie became
extinct and their territories, embracing some of the richest agricultural land in France as well as the
towns which accommodated the fairs of Champagne, passed to the Crown by a series of dexterous
marriages. To these spectacular gains were added many lesser territories, filling the interstices of the
existing domain or planting the seeds of future expansion. Philip the Fair alone, who reigned between
1285 and 1314, acquired Chartres, Beaugency and Montpellier by purchase, Mortagne and Tournai by
confiscation, the counties of La Marche and Angoulême by foreclosing on a mortgage. Along the
eastern march of his kingdom, he acquired Lyon and the imperial free county of Burgundy, and
gradually insinuated his officials into the Barrois.
Although these acquisitions, and others which followed them, proved in retrospect to be the
foundation of the nation state, it is unlikely that the Capetian kings saw them in that light. They were
advancing the interests of their family which they only indistinctly identified with the nation. And
they gave out with one hand even as they drew in with the other. The doctrine that the royal domain
was inalienable did not become an overt principle of royal policy until the Edict of Moulins in 1566.
Louis IX restored to the English dukes of Aquitaine a large part of what his father had taken from
them not, as he told the councillors who had opposed it, because he was bound to do so ‘but so that
there may be love between my children and his, who are cousins’. It was a private act as much as a
public one. Not only Louis but most rulers of his dynasty treated the royal domain as a source of
patronage, granting away rights and immunities in a manner which horrified some of the civil service.
The kings were not hoarders of land as the Church was. They gave away whole regions of France to
their brothers and sons to be ruled by them and their heirs forever as appanages, principalities for
many purposes independent of the Crown. Louis VIII, who died in 1226, had added more to the royal
domain than any Capetian king, but in his will he left Artois to his second son, Poitou and Auvergne to
his third and Anjou and Maine to his fourth. The heir to the throne inherited little more than the old
domain of the Ile de France plus Normandy. Philip the Fair was almost as prodigal with his sons at the
beginning of the fourteenth century, and they in turn alienated great tracts of their inheritance. The
Crown was saved from the natural consequences of its largesse only by the extraordinary good fortune
that the younger branches of the Capetian dynasty were as short-lived and infertile as the older
branches were prolific and healthy.
In 1328 the area directly governed by the Crown had reached the full tide from which it was to ebb
back in a century and a half of political disintegration, civil war and foreign occupation. It covered
about two-thirds of the French kingdom: Paris and the Ile de France; Picardy; Normandy and Maine;
Anjou, Touraine and the Orléanais in the Loire valley; the central provinces of Poitou, Limousin and
most of Berry; and Languedoc in the south. The French kings governed the rest of France in some
cases indirectly, in others not at all. There were, first of all, the three ‘great fiefs’ of Flanders, Brittany
and Aquitaine, virtually autonomous principalities governed by independent dynasties whose princes
only intermittently formed part of the French political community. Then there were the appanages
created by past kings for their younger sons: in 1328 the dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon and the
counts of Artois, Alençon and Evreux. They were run on similar lines, with many of the same
freedoms, but by men whose links with the Crown, links of blood, sentiment and political interest
were so close as to make them at most times part of the government of the realm. This was true even
of the oldest of them, Burgundy, which had been severed from the royal domain for 300 years but
whose dukes remained among the closest associates of the kings of France until the extinction of their
line in the middle of the fourteenth century. A few much smaller territories, although they were not
appanages, enjoyed very similar privileges of self-government: the territories of the counts of Blois,
the lords of Montmorency, Joinville and Coucy; the rather special case of the county of Ponthieu,
around Abbeville, which the kings of England had acquired by marriage at the end of the thirteenth
century; and the Pyrenean territory of Foix-Béarn, which was too distant for effective royal
interference and perhaps too valuable as an ally against the English dynasty in Aquitaine.
In principle the difference between these august princes and the lesser nobility of the royal domain
was that the King’s judges had no jurisdiction and his officials no power over the inhabitants of their
territories. The holders of the great appanages and self-governing fiefs recognized their feudal
obligations to the Crown, obligations defined and limited by custom and by the terms of their grants
and their acts of homage. But they kept their own courts and maintained their own civil services,
which were generally exact miniatures of the contemporary organization of the royal government.
They passed their own legislation. Some of them coined their own money. If they were liable to do
military service (which was sometimes a vexed question), they received the King’s summons and
recruited their own armies at their own pay, levying their own taxes to pay for it. They were in effect
an intermediate level of government whose obligations were prescribed by law rather than
administrative practice. However their status, although high, was less peculiar than it seemed. Even
within the royal domain lords who held directly of the Crown had many of the same rights on a
smaller scale as the greatest of the land. They too held their own courts. They signalled their authority
by erecting gallows at the edges of their territory. They taxed their vassals and answered the King’s
summonses to military service not only in their own persons but with their vassals and retainers.
‘Every lord is sovereign in his own lordship,’ as Beaumanoir wrote. 16 It is true that their judges and
officials had to work side by side with those of the King and were liable to be called before the royal
courts to answer for their neglects and misdeeds, an uneasy coexistence which steadily undermined
their authority. But this, increasingly, was the lot of the officers of the great fiefs and appanages also.
The administration of the French kings on the eve of the Hundred Years War was the creation of
many hands. But one reign had fixed on it an imprint which it did not lose until the end of the middle
ages, that of Philip the Fair, who died in 1314 after a reign of nearly thirty years. In spite of the length
and importance of his reign, almost nothing is known of the character of this remarkable man save
that he was cold, taciturn and spare with confidences. ‘He is not man or beast,’ one of his enemies
asserted, ‘he is a graven image.’17 Philip surrounded himself with a small circle of professional
advisers, senior civil servants of whom many were low-born, ambitious, able and therefore unpopular.
Whether the King was the author of the policy or the tool of his advisers is a question on which even
his contemporaries were unable to make an informed judgement and historians have no more than
their guesses to go by. What is clear is that Philip (or perhaps it was his advisers) had a fervent,
almost religious belief in the significance of his royal office. ‘The King stands above the law, above
all customary right and private privilege,’ an official pamphleteer wrote in reply to Pope Boniface
VIII, who had ventured to challenge his right to tax the clergy; ‘it is his prerogative to make law or to
amend or abrogate it as he may deem fit after taking counsel of his subjects.’18
Philip the Fair had the advantage of well-prepared foundations, the work for the most part of his
ancestors Philip Augustus and St Louis, who had begun the creation of the most impressive civil
service in medieval Europe. The old royal court had formed itself gradually into five principal
departments whose functions were only vaguely defined and whose staff overlapped. These were the
royal household and Chancery, which still travelled around the country with the King, and the
treasury, Chambre des Comptes and Parlement, which were directed by professional administrators
working from Paris. During the reign of Philip’s sons and the first Valois king, Philip VI, the
Chancery, which served as a general secretariat for the whole operation of government, gradually
became a sedentary department based in Paris like the judicial and financial organs of the state. The
royal palace of the Cité was bursting with clerks, lawyers and officials. Philip the Fair and his sons
enlarged the palace threefold to contain them, and expenditure on administrative salaries increased by
leaps and bounds. Some statistics presented to Philip VI in the early years of the war with England
present a striking picture of the inexorable expansion of the functions of government and the size of
the central bureaucracy. Between 1314 and 1343 the number of principal judicial officers of the
various royal courts in Paris increased fourfold; the number of notaries by about the same; the
‘sergeants’ who enforced compliance with the orders of the King’s ministers and judges increased
sevenfold. In 1326 the royal Chancery used no less than a ton and a quarter of wax for sealing
documents.19
The broad lines of royal policy were determined in the Great Council, so called not for its size but
because it dealt with the great affairs of the kingdom. It was in fact quite small, consisting of a clique
of influential administrators and friends of the King and a fluctuating body of grandees, the princes of
the royal family and the great noblemen and ecclesiastical lords whose presence close to the King was
sanctified by tradition and expected by popular prejudice. In the course of Philip’s reign the
professional element largely displaced these grandees, a policy which caused unfavourable comment
not only among the grandees themselves, and was reversed in the time of his successors. Most of the
professionals came from the lowest level of lay society in which literacy could be expected, from the
ranks of the gentry of the provinces, men whose families had often been left behind in the prosperity
of the thirteenth century and who owed everything to the King. Philip’s two great chancellors, Pierre
Flote and Guillaume de Nogaret, both began their careers obscurely as civil lawyers in the south. Flote
was a younger son of a minor knightly family from the Velay. Nogaret was a provincial judge who
came from a bourgeois family of Toulouse. Enguerran de Marigny, Philip’s chamberlain and in his
last years virtually chief minister, was the son of an undistinguished Norman seigneur. For him, royal
service meant power and fame, a portrait painting and a statue in the royal palace, a fortune
accumulated by more or less questionable means, laid out on large estates and on the fine collegiate
church and curious collection of religious statuary, both of which can still be seen at his home town of
Ecouis in Normandy. Marigny and his kind earned their high rewards. They brought to the royal
service intense loyalty, professional skills and, in some cases, acute political judgement. Without
them a government growing in size and importance would have passed out of the King’s control, as
indeed under his successors it showed signs of doing.
The provincial bureaucracy of the Crown was in some ways more remarkable because local
administration tended to be the weak point of even the best-organized medieval governments. The
regions directly governed by the Crown were divided into thirty-six administrative districts known as
baillages (in the old royal domain) or sénéchaussés (in the newly acquired provinces of the centre and
south). The King’s interests in these districts were entrusted to baillis and seneschals. Alongside them
other officials performed subordinate or specialized functions: judges, lieutenant-bailiffs, provosts of
towns, viscounts and receivers, and those ubiquitous minor functionaries of the royal administration,
the ‘sergeants’ (servientes), who executed the orders of the others with such force as was required.
Baillis and seneschals were men of consequence, and they were well paid. Many of them, like their
superiors in the central administration about the King, were making a career which would not have
been open to them in any other walk of life. Barthélemy de Montbrison, who became the
lieutenant-bailli of Lyon in 1336, was for ten years the most powerful man in the city, dealing on
equal terms with the Archbishop and the commune; yet if he had not left his native city in his youth to
study law he would in all probability have become a skinner like his father. 20 In a few districts, those
close to the frontier or newly acquired by the Crown, they exercised political functions of great
importance. The bailli of Vermandois represented the King in the political turmoil of Flanders. The
seneschals of Périgord and (later) Agen did the same in Aquitaine. But their regular functions were
more humdrum. They enforced public order. They collected the revenues of the domain. And they
exercised that peculiar mixture of public and private rights which was the substance of sovereignty in
the middle ages: the mass of miscellaneous jurisdictions and privileges which the Crown had inherited
or acquired from former feudal lords and which had to be exercised in competition with others still in
private hands, accretions built up in layers over the centuries and discovered like the revelation of
some complicated archaeological site. Assertiveness was a substitute for clarity. Provincial officials
commonly became more royalist than the King, trespassing beyond their jurisdiction in the effort to
make good their claims and ignoring royal grants of privilege and immunity. By intervening in other
men’s quarrels, by offering the loser a right of appeal from some lesser jurisdiction, by extending the
royal protection to those who had rightly or wrongly fallen foul of the great of the province, by
grinding diligence such men could gnaw away at seigneurial rights until they fell into desuetude or
were conquered by those of the Crown.
The great achievement of the lawyers of the last five Capetian kings, who reigned between 1270 and
1328, was to build from the Crown’s disparate medley of rights a coherent notion of public law and of
the state’s authority. Still no more than an ambition, it was not to be justified by political facts before
the seventeenth century. But there was one area where these ideas had practical consequences of
enormous importance even in 1328. Since the middle of the thirteenth century the jurists of the Crown
had developed the novel doctrine that the King could hear appeals even from those parts of the
kingdom to which his power did not yet extend whenever it was alleged that the local judges had
‘denied justice’ by misconducting their proceedings or committed an error of law. The manner in
which this doctrine was applied was deeply offensive to the holders of the surviving seigneurial
jurisdictions. For a litigant who appealed to the King’s court was entitled to the protection
(sauvegarde) of his officers. For the purposes of his suit the litigant had removed himself from the
authority of his immediate lord and placed himself immediately under that of the King. His land
became an island of extra-territorial jurisdiction flying the King’s banner and marked out with the
symbolic gallows emblazoned with the fleur-de-lys. So, with the right to hear appeals, there
penetrated into the remaining private lordships and busy royal officials, clerks, notaries and sergeants
who protected appellants, made the necessary inquiries, settled documents and invited others who had
failed in the accustomed forum to shop for a better one.
The ultimate beneficiary of this constant jockeying for jurisdiction was the Parlement of Paris, not a
parliament in the English sense but a supreme court hearing appeals in the growing number of cases
which the King’s servants claimed as his own. Ostensibly the King’s Council sitting in a judicial
capacity, the Parlement was in the process of being taken over by full-time professional jurists. By the
death of Charles IV the Parlement sat in several divisions, accumulating measureless archives and
served by an army of functionaries. In the Salle des Pas Perdus of the royal palace in Paris, surrounded
by the statues of the kings of France, gathered the crowds of litigants and petitioners whose concern to
put their cases before the King’s own court had in parts of the kingdom reduced the proceedings of the
seigneurial courts to the status of mere formal preliminaries to a battle carried on elsewhere. The
appellants had become so numerous that periodic attempts were made to refer the less important
causes of dispute back to the bailiffs and seneschals. But the solution ultimately adopted was a further
increase in the size of an already ungainly tribunal. The rapporteurs of the Chambre des Enquêtes,
who were responsible for assessing the evidence before the trial, were four in number during the reign
of Philip the Fair; there were thirty-three of them under his son Philip V. The principal division of the
court, which heard appeals involving ‘grave cause … grande personne, grands hommes’ had no less
than twenty-three judges in 1319.21
The middle ages were litigious. Their institutions were rent by competition for jurisdiction pursued
with a passion which is apt to seem pointless and absurd. But contemporaries did not see it like that.
The administration of justice was not only an important source of revenue; it was the highest attribute
of sovereignty. Those servants of the Crown who purposefully set about making the enforcement of
law a royal monopoly have a better claim to be regarded as the founders of the French state than the
soldiers and politicians whose contribution, because it was more heroic, is better known.
Because the servants of the state were articulate propagandists for their cause, it is easy to gain the
impression that they completely succeeded. In fact their success was only partial. It is true that the
bureaucracy which they created enabled a Parisian monarchy to retain control in normal conditions of
one of the largest and most diverse countries of Europe. It is true that in spasms of exertion it was
capable of spectacular displays of executive power. The simultaneous arrest of almost all the
Templars in France on 13 October 1307, which had been planned in secrecy in Paris for some weeks,
would have been beyond every other European state of the fourteenth century. But although the agents
of the state held the advanced positions, the ground behind them had not yet been occupied. There had
not been the same thoroughgoing change in the attitude of the governed as there had in that of their
masters.
Attitudes to public order were revealing. ‘The King’s peace is the peace of the whole kingdom; and
the peace of the kingdom is the peace of the Church, the defence of all knowledge, virtue and justice,’
a propagandist declared from his pulpit; ‘… therefore, whoever acts against the King acts against the
whole Church, the Catholic faith, and all that is holy and just.’22 Perhaps under the strain of the
Flemish war (the occasion for this sermon) the audience was receptive. The notion of public authority
which made civil violence an offence against the state had been well developed in England since the
twelfth century but it was only intermittently recognized in France before the fifteenth. Rebellion was
simply politics by other means. The thought that it might be treason took a long time to penetrate even
official circles. The stages of its penetration can be traced in the manner in which unsuccessful rebels
were treated. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was extremely rare for them to be executed as
traitors. Guy of Dampierre, Count of Flanders, for example, went almost unpunished although he
waged public war on Philip the Fair and fell into the power of his enemy. The first nobleman to be
drawn and hanged for treason was Jourdain de l’Isle-Jourdain, a robber baron from the south-west
‘noble in lineage but ignoble in deed’ who was executed in Paris in 1323. Some of the leaders of the
rebellions of Flanders were tortured to death in 1328. During the first decade of the Hundred Years
War, when Philip VI had to deal with a serious crisis of public order and the dissolution of natural
loyalties in the face of political and military defeat, he resorted to such public executions with
gruesome regularity. These spectacular assertions of sovereignty reflected the government’s fear and
insecurity. They were a substitute for real authority. There were many who could not share Philip’s
abhorrence of treachery even under the strain of war. The executions were regarded as strange and